different justifications for undertaking targeted killing or other acts involving the use of force overseas. and one is to invoke the 2001 authorization for use of military force against al-qaeda, against groups or individuals or states that planned, carried out or harbored those who planned or carried out the 9/11 attacks or associated forces. and here we start to get into some iffy definitional questions, and having worked in the clinton white house, i always have to to promise not to make what it depends the meaning jokes. [laughter] you get into justification number two, the u.s. constitution says that the president may use force without asking congress first to defend against imminent threats. so it depends what your definition of imminent is. and there's a fabulous section in this leaked memo which talks about imminent not really meaning imminent as i understand it, which is imminently peter is

going to tell me to stop talking and let someone else speak, but, well, if we get to the point where it is imminent and we didn't do something about it when we could have, then the moment counts as imminent. now, that's an interesting definition of imminent. and i'm not a lawyer, but at what level do we, the american people, or at least our elected representatives need to understand that? justification number three is international humanitarian law says states may use force in self-defense, but what constitutes self- defense? if isis in iraq is threatening the iraqi state and iraq is partner of ours, is a state that we have agreements with but not a treaty ally, does that constitute self-defense? if we know about an al-qaeda attack imminent not against the u.s., but against a nato ally, does that count as self-defense? if we know about an attack on a shopping mall where americans might be targets, does that

count as self-defense? and those are all really hard questions that there aren't flip, easy answers to. and anyone who tells you, well, the obvious answer is x or the obvious answer is y, that's wrong. but what we do know as a society is that at the moment we don't understand how those decisions are being made, and east you base -- either you basically trust this administration and wonder how the decisions would be made under another administration, or you basically don't trust this administration and don't like the idea that they're making decisions without oversight. and either way you might come out with the idea that completely apart from your views on the actual legality, morality, wisdom of any of the elements that make up what we're doing under the aumf, it's time for a review. now, here we come to the fun of american politics. and when i started working on the piece, the great minds at

democracy were very keen to draw comparison to the 1970s and the great national security reforms that took place then. and i think it's worth, i think it's worth highlighting what's similar and what's different about the great reforms of the 1970s. and first, you had just come through a war in which america -- into which americans had been drafted and in which hundreds of thousands of american lives had been lost. second, you had a continuing string of embarrassing intel revelations including for those of us not old enough to remember this, that the cia had stockpiled enough toxin to assassinate thousands of world leaders. and you had a degree -- i don't want to exaggerate this, i don't want to say that the 1970s were some sort of house yang moment, but there was a degree of partisan comity around these issues. so it was possible to have a debate and to formulate reforms

like the war powers act that commanded some support although not a lot of support, and they were very controversial and considered very watered down by both parties in congress. the last point that we had in the '70s that we don't have now is that within each party you -- or more so in the republicans, perhaps -- but you had something of a coherent idea about what each party stood for in terms of how american national security should be secured, and you had a degree of party discipline. the fascinating thing that you see as you're heading into 014 and -- 2014 and thinking about the politics of these issues is biggest debates about what to do about the aumf are not between republicans and democrats, but they're among republicans. they're between rand paul who wants the president to have to come back to congress anytime he wants to use force against any terrorist group and lindsey graham who says we are at war,

the earth is the battlefield, and the president should be taking the fight to the battlefield, the whole earth. and basically, you can fit every democrat within that continuum. so when you have one party that really, truly has an -- and, you know, not just among sort of random people in the party, you have rand paul and chris christie fighting about, in public, about what are adequate and appropriate counterterrorism measures. two of the most talked-about possible presidential nominees. so at the most profound level in the republican party, you don't have agreement about what our counterterrorism strategy is or should be. and in that situation it's very difficult to be part of a well thought out reform process. on the democratic side, you have the fact that your party is in power, and you don't want to embarrass your president, and you have a lot of other things on your plate. and you have this white house and, frankly, anyone who's watched congress in the past six

months with sufficient justification saying, well, as constitutional lawyers it would be much better if congress fixed this, but we don't trust you guys to do it right. if you can't deal with the debt ceiling, if you can't deal with the budget, how can we trust you to deal with the power of war? so we're in this odd moment that u.s. combat troops will leave afghanistan in december 2014, the war that americans thought we were signing up to fight will end. this authorization, in all likelihood -- although there is a repeal bill introduced in the house by representative adam schiff and a proposal being talked about on the senate side floated by senator corker -- in all likelihood, nothing will happen, and we will enter 2015 with this sort offedly outdated -- oddly outdated authorization to fight a war against a group of people who with really one major exception

are all dead or in custody and their successors, associates ill defined. this -- most people believe this is legally okay. obviously, from a policy and propaganda point of view, it's a little dubious. there is the interesting question of whether you're still allowed to hold prisoners at guantanamo after you are no longer fighting the war which you were authorized to fight. now, after world war ii there was a winddown period of some years. this doesn't mean on january 1st the gates need to pop open, but it becomes harder and harder -- and with due defense to the legal question -- it becomes harder and harder in the court of public opinion to explain what it is that we're doing and why we're doing it. and that, ultimately, the biggest reason to look hard at this issue and to have conversations like this and to

have lots more of these conversations in 2014 is, frankly, not because of the institutionalist concern cans, not because of the balance of power between executive and legislative, not even because of human rights concerns, but because if your goal is to defeat terrorism and if you have a long range strategy that depends on fewer people in targeted countries taking up terrorist tactics, you have to be able to explain what you're doing and how you're on their side. and a war which is sort of a war, sort of against you, sort of not against you, we're not going to tell you what we're doing, we can't really tell you why your neighbor's house got blown up, and we can't have an honest discussion, we can only have a superpropagandized discussion about who was killed, who wasn't killed is an effectiveness point of view problem. so the challenge of 2014 in my view, and i'm actually hoping to pick a fight with the panel, is actually not to get wrapped up in war powers act reform or in

sort of how many senators on what day bar naming who as a terrorist group. but it is to have a national elite conversation, a national public conversation about what it is we want to do to deal with the post, post-9/11 problem of terrorism and what authorities a president, any president, this president, the next president, needs to counter them, how we enact those in a way that uses our legal system, uses our legal system, our military and all of the, frankly, longer-term and push more important diplomatic and economic cultural aspects of counterterrorism policy as all working together to make sure that we keep going forward and, frankly, don't get stuck not just in the name of endless war, but the actual kinds of casualties and horrors of the war that we saw in the last decade and don't want to see again. thanks. >> thank you, heather. that was brilliant. [applause]

>> so i have a bit of a cough, and so if i burst out coughing, please, ascribe no content to that in any political direction. [laughter] so peter asked me to give a sort of overview of the sort of legal issues surrounding the aumf in 15 minutes, which is a bit of a project. i'm going to just try to speak really quickly. i think a year ago three colleagues and i sat down and thought we would rewrite the aumf. and the idea here was that we were more than ten years out of 9/11. the aumf is an instrument that

is very focused on a response to 9/11, and we were fighting a conflict that no longer involved groups that even existed at the time of 9/11, though a lot of them had embraced the name al-qaeda in various parts of the world. and so we thought, you know, if you were a lawyer in the executive branch or in the legislative branch and you were concerned with what i think of as sort of basic constitutional hygiene and you were committed to having an authorizing document for this conflict, it would be better -- not to say what we were doing was illegal or improper, but you would prefer to be operating on basis of an instrument that describes the conflict you were fighting rather than the conflict that you were fighting ten years earlier or that you thought ten years earlier that you might be fighting. and so we tried to sit down and imagine what would a congress that wanted to, a, authorize, b,

limit and, c, define the scope of the conflict that we were actually engaged in, what would that congress actually write? and we wrote a sort of an options paper with some choices which i'm happy to discuss in the q&a the details of to the extent you all want to. and this provoked -- we releasedded it, i think, in february of last year, and it provoked a pretty raging debate in the sort of legal circles that work on the sort of law of the conflict. for a period of about two months until the president's may 23rd speech at the national defense university. and in that speech the president said, as heather quoted, that this war, like all wars, must end. and as part of his conception of the end of the war, he announced very clearly -- and i have to say i admire the clarity with which he said this if not the

degree to which i understand quite what he meant, but he said very clearly that he would not sign any law that attempted to expand or continue the aumf and would work toward, with congress, toward its narrowing and eventual repeal. and so, you know i stand here to say at least in the short term we were completely and utterly defeated in our efforts to extend, define and add deaf national contour to the conflict. which raises the question why this issue is still important, if it's. if it's. the president has said he's committed to brunging this war -- bringing this war to an end. we're moving people out of afghanistan over the course of this year, and we have developed a remarkable series of legal

fictions that everybody seems if not content with, more or less comfortable being uncomfortable living under in which we get to continue the fight even though we're pretending that the war is over. and roughly speaking, those legal fictions work like this: we continue to do drone strikes using in various places in the world using three basic ideas. one is that forces associated with al-qaeda are co-belligerent with al-qaeda for purposes of international law. they've joined the fight on the side of al-qaeda and, therefore, we're entitled to attack them. number two, to the extent that that may not be the case, we're entitled as an independent matter of international law to engage, as heather said, in

self-defense. that means if there's an imminent threat, you can use lethal force ore pell it. -- to repel it. now, that's true for domestic constitutional law purposes. and we define imminence rather broadly. that's not a new thing in american foreign diplomacy, legal affairs. we've done that, i think, at least since the '80s. but the notion that we use imminence is one that is relatively capacious. and so, number three, we -- ever since the president's speech, we've said we're only going to target people with lethal force when their capture is not feasible. and this puts a similar stress on what the definition of the word "feasible" is. so you can say by taking a capacious notion of associated forces, a capacious notion of imminence and a narrow notion of

feasible, you're able to do a lot of the things that you want to do either under the current aumf, continuing under the aumf or even as you move the aumf towards obsolescence. now everybody hates living under the aumf. there are people who pretend otherwise but, in fact, nobody thinks -- almost nobody -- thinks that continuing to operate under a more than decade-old instrument that describes a different conflict, this is not a good idea. but we do it anyway, and the reason we do it is that it's everybody's second worst option. from the administration's point of view, there are operations we still need to do, and heather alluded to this. it's an important tail that wags the dog. there are people at guantanamo we don't want to release. there are operations that we want to conduct. thisthis is the authorizing doct

for those operations. it's a real problem to not have an aumf. but you also want to be the president who's ending wars. you believe in that, that's part of your self-conception, and i think, you know, he's entirely sincere about that. and so the best, the least worst option, as rumsfeld might say, is to continue to rely on the aumf while promising that you are moving it toward obsolescence. and this is a sort of convenient fiction for the administration which has even elements of nonfiction associated with it. importantly, when the defense department testifies about what aumf allows them to do, they sound very different than the president sounded at the may 23rd speech. and a few weeks before that speech senior officials of the to pentagon testified before the senate armed services committee. the document that they described

sounded like a human rights group's nightmare of endless war anywhere in the world. so why on the left side, rights commitments, the au -- communities, the aumf is this horrible endless war, geographically unlimited, but there's one thing worse than the aumf, and that's what we proposed which is codifying some prospective authority that pulls away the fiction that this is winding down to an end. and so, you know, there's from the human rights community's point of view, there is something worse than the aumf which is no aumf. and from the right -- sorry, replacing the aumf. and from the right's point of view, a lot of people on the right would agree with, at least the lindsey graham right, would agree with people like me in principle, that ideally you

would want a document that reflects the war we're actually fighting. but here's the problem. once you open it up, they're grade you'll limit it. afraid you'll limit it. and so everybody has a preferred option. they go in very different directions. but everybody's second worst option is the current status quo. and that is why we are going to continue living under a very old document, and we're going to interpret it at any given moment in time to allow us to do the things that we're doing. now, the if i sound contemptuous of this as a compromise, i am. i think it's a bad, unhygienic from a constitutional democracy standpoint, way to go about it. but, um, the truth is that, you know, we lost that discussion. and i'm at this point a little bit resigned to the fact that there is not a broad constituency for what i think

would be the better, healthier way to do this, which would be to talk about, have a serious conversation hike the one this event -- like the one this event is about which are what are the things we want? where are the places we want to be fighting a conflict, if any? what are the groups we actually want to think of ourselves at war with? who cowe want to authorize -- do we want to authorize those extraordinary power against, and what are the mechanisms that we do and don't want to use as a way of defining this? now, in defense of our political system, let me just say that this is actually a really hard problem. it's hard politically. it's hard in terms of the geopolitics. what are the countries in which you want to think of yourself as in military conflict? where would you never use military force? what are the groups you think of as just groups that call

themselves al-qaeda but really they're just sort of, you know, guard variety terrorists? what are the groups that you meaningfully think are groups you would want to use military force against? these are very, very hard questions, and that's just the political and strategic side of it. the legal side of it is really hard. if you declare a state of armed conflict legally against certain groups, normally we think of that as an authorization of the use of force as a fairly static instrument, you know? you're authorized to attack germany and its allies. you're authorized to attack, you know, you can define that pretty easily. you have a world in which the enemy is ever changing, how do you deal with that legally? this is a very, very hard problem. and one that, you know, there are no perfect answers to.

congress is not so good at really hard problems right now. and, you know, one of the things that's happened in the last year since i worked on this paper was that, you know, congress couldn't keep the government open. relatively easy problems that, you know, are not the sort of thing you would think -- they actually don't require huge intellectual investment, thought, you know? should you pass an appropriations bill such that the government of the united states doesn't shut down? and i do think that there is, you know, one virtue you can say about the current environment, and i know there are people in the audience who will not see this as a virtue. i flirt with the idea that it's a virtue, that it is static and self-perpetuating. if you don't do anything legislate i legislatively, the

authorities persist, and we don't lurch from crisis to crisis at least in terms of the basic legal authority. so i would say that in some weird sense i, too, see the current situation as distasteful as i find it as the second worst option. and i think having, you know, what would be the best option is if we could have a serious discussion about what sort of legal instruments we want to govern, you know, the next ten years or five years of the conflict. what would be the worst option is if we lurched from option to option so that there was the kind of uncertainty in overseas military operations and overseas counterterrorism operations that we have seen in, say, fiscal matters. i'm going to stop there. >> thank you, ben. [applause] that was also brilliant. micah.

>> thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to come down and speak to everybody. and i want to thank new america who has been at the forefront of a lot of these issues for quite a long time and for the better thoughts for the panelists who went before me. i just had five relatively, i think, quick points which touch upon some what has already been addressed but maybe provides it in a slightly new light. you know, one of the things that is worth thinking about is the extent to which the capabilities the united states has to conduct some of these operations has morphed significantly since 9/11. you know, one of the -- i spent a lot of time talking to people in the military and much fewer people in the intelligence commitment, but certainly in the military one of the things that makes them distinctly uncomfortable among senior officers and general officers is the extent to which the use of military force is an extremely easy thing now. it used to be, they used to be larger logistical, diplomatic, political hurdles to using force, and the use of force is

now a pretty easy thing to do. and one of the ways to think about this my own topic is just with unmanned aerial vehicles. on 9/11 the united states had 3167 -- 167 drones, three or four could drop bombs period. just last month, the defense department released its latest road map, dod now has 11,000 drones, somewhere between 50 and 40 -- 350 and 400 of them can drop bombs. and it's important to remember this capability emerged if you go back and read the 9/11 commission and some of the debates around the ability to find military options to go after osama bin laden was that the clinton administration, specifically seniors in the national security council, were never comfortable with the options the military came up with. it was using the northern alliance, it was a huge logistical foot print, it would cost billions of dollars, you'd have to put in an armored division, and they were simply unsatisfied with it. and the solution, which was developed by a small number of people in the air force and the director of operations and the

joint staff and in the cia, was to put an antitank helicopter missile on a platform that was created simply to spy. and what that platform did was it provided three immediate and inherent advantages over all other weapons platforms. one, the ability to persist over a target for much longer periods of time than you can with manned aircraft. the second is the responsiveness where you have the surveillance and strike platforms. and the third, obviously, doesn't put service members or pilots at risk of being captured or kills in hostile environments. and that's a significant change. and subsequently, this capability that was developed to kill one guy has killed something like 3600 people in non-battlefield settings since the first one on december -- i'm sorry, november 3, 2002. so there's been something by my count, about 460 targeted killings, about 99% of them have been simply with drones. and it's important to understand that the drone is the distinct reason for a lot of these. there was, at one time, a

strong, enduring normative opinion among the intelligence community and the military that we don't conduct non-battlefield killings of this nature. and it was the position of the u.s. government this particular to admonish other governments that did it, specifically the government of israel. and what was once largely unthinkable in a lot of, among a lot of communities in the u.s. government is now fairly routine. and the number of strikes have come down, as heather pointed out, they peaked in 2010. and the reason the number of strikes peaked in 2010 in pakistan specifically is because they matched directly with the surge of u.s. forces, and they also if you map the number of our strieks in afghanistan which you can find as an unclassified number, they all sort of match the same. the second capability is special operators, and here special operations command, you know, at one time i know there was something like ten hollywood movies either in theaters or in development of just about navy seals alone. the command has doubled in size, its budget has more than

tripled, now deployed in more than a hundred countries. admiral mcraven has a great line which is everyone was really attracted to the osama bin laden raid, and he said, actually, it was a very standard raid, we did 11 similar raids that night this afghanistan. and the ability of special operators combining using intelligence collection and going after time-sensitive targets is just changed exponentially. and everyone you talk to in the special operator's world will tell you this. i can go in some detail if you're interested in a case study i studied very closely where in the her of 2002 the bush administration almost authorized a strike in northern iraq which was againstal sa ca by who later -- al-zarqawi where he was living, and they almost went after him, and it was a complete disaster from start to finish. they had months and months to man, and they never had confidence in the capabilities and the risks associated with

the mission. now conducting a similar raid would be fairly routine and fairy standard. the third capability so fencive cyber capabilities. and as we learned from the, one of the recently-leaked edward snowden documents in 2011, the u.s. conducted 231 offensive cyber capabilities. these are beyond just stuxnet, but the ability to disrupt and destroy an adversary's computer networks. and if you go and you go and reread congressional hearings about what are the situations under which the u.s. will use offensive cyber, what is the strategy, what is the supporting doctrine, what is the understanding for when such missions can be undertaken, nobody seems to know. it's always under development, under review but not quite there. so it's important to understand that capabilities that were nascent or far less develop toed on september 14th when congress passed the aumf are radically transformed and more enhanced and sort of more standardized throughout the u.s. government.

the capabilities that did not exist now exist in great abundance. the second issue i would just mention is people have discussed this, we've never been told who we're at war with. al-qaeda and associated forces is a convenient tent, but if you refuse to articulate the scope of who you can go after, it's really hard to assess when the war could end and how well you're doing. there are various bits and pieces for how you can try to figure out who we're at war with. there's the biannual white house war powers resolution report where they list some countries, but there's a classified annex. apparently more detailed. the state department has something called the foreign terrorist organization list. currently, there are 57 groups who are considered foreign terrorist organizations. by my count, something like nine or ten have been targeted by the united states with lethal force, but we've never been said whether you have to be an fto, a foreign terrorist organization, and if you actually look at the state department and add how many people are members of those

ftos, it's something like 10,000 different people, so the scope of targeting is divide bigger than you -- quite bigger than you think. it wasn't until february of 2013 that senator ron riden was -- ron wyden was provided a list of countries, and it wasn't until may 2013 that the senate armed services committee was told who is directly entitled to use lethal force. at a hearing in may, michael sheehan who was at the time of special operations, i'm not sure there is a list per se. levin was then apparently provided some list. that list has never been made public, and when the pentagon spokesperson was asked why hasn't it been made public, he said doing so would cause serious damage to national security because elements that might be considered associated forces can build credibility by being listed by the u.s. we cannot afford to inflate these organizations by naming them. so it's important to understand the reason we don't know who we're at war with is because the

pentagon is worried that these groups will brag that they've been named and targeted. which, of course, these groups don't need official fuel for their pr efforts, but this is the official reason why we can't know who we're at war with. the third issue people have discussed is the aumf is really deeply misleading. the notion that al-qaeda and associated forces, it assumes a sameness to all the scope of targeting. it assumes that individuals targeted in pakistan are the same as individuals targeted in yemen, as the same as individuals targeted in somalia and libya. it's really not true at all. that's an immense operational fiction. the types of targeting the u.s. has done in pakistan which is primarily about force protection for u.s. individuals deployed in southern afghanistan, it's primarily about going after individuals who want to attack what they consider the apostate regime in islamabad, very different than aqap elements who have been targeted in yemen.

even in word -- world war ii, congress declared war against six specific states. all the axis got their own congressional declaration of war. and that only lasts, you know, five years. and here you have a situation where we now are 13 years in, anyone that's an al-qaeda-associated force who is explicitly not named is sort of provided under the same umbrella. the final issue or one other issue is that another significant shift since 9/11 which is worth considering is what i consider outsouring lethality. -- outsourcing lethality. and these are other states who receive firepower and targeting intelligence from the united states. so since 9/11 the u.s. has provided targeting intelligencing for lethal strikes by pakistan, turkey, ethiopia, honduras, uganda, france and iraq at least. according to state department reports, a lot of these airstrikes result in human casualties.

if the u.s. is concerned about who it targets with lethal force and what sort of civilian protections they should be provided, it might be worth part of the conversation to think about when the u.s. provides the enabling logistical or intelligence support that allows other countries to kill individuals. final issue is the politics of this. you know, obama has said on many different occasions that he wants to engage with congress and the american people and repeal the aumf. the problem is that this message has not been received by the commander in chief's message hasn't been received by the rest of the u.s. government. at the 345eu hearing with a -- may hearing with a number of pentagon officials said i think the current structure works very well for us. caroline cross, who was the counselor general, the lead lawyer at the cia, in her december congressional hearing, she also said i believe the aumf as currently drafted is sufficient, and the interpretation add adopted by this administration is a legally

available interpretation. so there's no appetite within the individuals who actually conduct the operations for changing the aumf. and i think unless there is high level sort of senior demand for it, it's never going to happen because you have to make the operators comfortable before senior civilian policymakers will have the courage to sort of implement change. i'll just add or -- close by noting i was reviewing all of the sort of op-eds, the congressional speeches and editorials around the week after 9/11, and one of the things that a lot of constitutional lawyers and military officers were happy with was the narrowness of the congressional mandate that was bestowed on president bush. that this was nobody thought at the time that the u.s. would be at war for 13 years or would have used that mandate for 13 years. president bush at his great speech he gave at the national cathedral prayer service on the evening that congress passed the aumf, he says this conflict was begun on the timing in terms of

others, it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing. seems that the discussion about when that hour come toes is now ours to have -- comes is now ours to have given that the individuals directly capable for the events of 9/11 are largely no longer with us. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, micah. well, ben, if you were rewriting the aumf today, because it seems to me that perhaps you and micah are sort of in agreement which is what we need is an aumf that names our enemies specifically, who would be on the list? where's the cutoff? so i presume al-qaeda would be on the list. >> um, so, look, there's -- broadly speaking, there's three ways to do this if you're congress. one is to make an itemized list of the groups that you want to authorize force against.

now, this is the traditional way to do it, right? you know, you are authorized to use force against the imperial government of japan. you are authorized to use force against the perpetrators, the individuals, the persons, states, organizations responsible for 9/11 or those that harbored them. you're authorized -- one is to name the target, organizations, groups, states people specifically. now, this is impossible to do in the current context because organizations change, and they change their names, and the more specifically you name them, the more quickly the instrument becomes useless. and this has been a problem even under the aumf. it's why the words associated forces, which actually don't appear in the aumf, have taken on such weight. because, you know, a series of

organizations have sort of shown up in the conflict that weren't, you know, that aren't obviously described by original document. so the second option is to describe the category of organization and then leave it to the executive to figure out which organizations at any given moment in time do and don't meet those descriptions. >> so as a practical matter, i think there's little debate that al-qaeda would be on your list however it's categorized. >> correct. >> so what about a group like lashkar-e-taiba who actually targeted mumbai in 2008? what would that -- would that be on the list? >> so look, you know, i have always refrained from -- i'm not an analyst of the groups. i'm not a terrorism expert. and so which groups belong in

which category is really, frankly, beyond my expertise. >> this is not a hypothetical. this is a group that attacked americans, specifically sought out an american target overseas. >> yep. >> forget about name of the group, let's say that this group is called we hate americans. would this we hate americans group be on your list? >> so, look, i don't think that hating or targeting americans is in and of itself enough to justify military conflict. there are a lot of groups in the world that don't like americans, there are a somewhat smaller subset of groups that actually do something about that. to me, what made the aumf worth passing -- look, hezbollah has targeted americans -- >> yeah, about 20 years ago. i mean -- >> right, but, you know, we did not pass an aumf that said, you know, go blitz rate hezbollah from the face of the earth -- obliterate hezbollah from the face of the earth.

so, you know, what made al-qaeda and what made the aumf, you know, worthwhile, in my judgment, was a sudden sense that there was a group of global reach that was at that time projecting force against us and that we lacked law enforcement means of of confronting because they were camped out in areas of the world in which the writs of our courts don't run and, frankly, the writs of other countries' courts don't run either in any meaningful sense. i think that is reasonably approximates the category of group that i would want to see us continuing to exert military force against -- >> micah? what's your view? >> i, i mean, my primary concern is not what legal support the president receives or has to conduct operations, because the president can always as commander in chief, one, he can

declare self-defense, two, he could -- for any covert operations, any title offense, he can place as he did under the osama bin laden raid special mission units from the u.s. military, put them under title 50 authorities, call it covert. this happens all the time. so the means by which the president can target individuals is meaningless. what i'm more interested in is assessing the honesty of what the u.s. government is doing. and the only way you can really do this is to have some sense of who is being targeted which is why i would be quite happy if the u.s. named the individual groups who are being directly targeted because it's very difficult to assess effectiveness of strategies unless you do. if it's just always amorphous, shifting groups that change names, etc., then what are we doing? i mean, in 2012 there was 15,000 fatalities from terrorism.

ten private u.s. citizens died from terrorism. most terrorism has nothing to do with america, nothing. when we see it emerge in areas of north africa, in the middle east and south aiz -- asia, it has nothing to do with us, and we should be limited laser-like on those individuals who do pose a threat to the u.s. homeland and potentially diplomatic sources abroad, but that's very few people. >> you know, peter, if i could jump in and actually try to draw those two together, then you didn't draw the consequences from your criteria, but i will. if you put criteria that limit it to groups with a global reach and groups that are explicitly aiming at targeting americans in some kind of large scale more than targets of opportunity way, that, in my view, eliminates most of the groups that commonly get trotted out now when we get told what a threat resurgent al-qaeda-linked terrorism is. and, again, it's, you know, hard to -- i would not like to have

this fight with someone who has access to a lot of classified, but we do need people who have that access to be having that discussion on our behalf. >> well, by the way, heather, i think you can have that discussion based on public information. let's say an american is killed in syria by an al-qaeda affiliate. this is a public event, so the notion that somehow there's this realm of classified data which prevents us -- that's an analog about the drones, right? drones are public events. >> but actually, i would counter that, and as much as it's a painful tragedy anytime an american is killed anywhere in the world and someone who travels and has family members who travel, it's something that concerns me greatly, when did one american getting killed somewhere be a reason for our country to go to war? is that the definition of war that we as a society want? and if it's not, then you have to base your judgment of of groups on something other than they killed one american because, and then that means

that they're trying to do what al-qaeda was trying to do in 2001 and collapse u.s. society. and, you know, lashkar-e-taiba is a great example of that, a nasty group that nobody should have any sympathy for that definitely would like to do harm on any americans it could easily get its hands on. but do we have any evidence that they are planning to do anything that harms us foundationally as a society? no, we don't. >> there are a couple other confounding variables here. one is that the enemy does get a vote as to whether you are in a conflict with them or not. and, you know, this is, this is not to say that everybody who stands up and says i'm at war with america should we, you know, give that vote its due. but there are groups who when they say it, you know, we've learned from some experience that they mean it. the second thing is that groups that are affiliated meaningfully with groups we are at war with,

i mean, the concept of co-belligerence is not without meaning. now, whether it means as much as the administration has put on it, i will actually defend what the administration has done on that. but i understand it's controversial. whether or not you would go that far, it surely isn't irrelevant that a group sees itself as a wing of al-qaeda, that a group has joined, sees itself as having joined the fight in, say, mali against a government in the banner of al-qaeda. and so the question of how seriously you take the pronouncements and ambitions of the constituent affiliate groups is a very difficult one and sort of defining what you understand the proper scope of the conflict to be. >> you're rewriting the aumf, how would you rewrite it? >> so you would have to, congress would have to have a debate and say we are at war, this is what we are at war with.

and i actually, i quite like ben's criteria of groups with a global reach and an avowed goal of harming core american interests. and -- >> who would you put on that list? your list? [laughter] >> i actually, i don't know that i would take the list approach at all. >> well, just -- i'm just asking your opinion. who should be on that list? >> okay. so core al-qaeda, maybe al-qaeda in the arabian peninsula and maybe al-shabaab based on what we saw about the training in connection with the raid in kenya which looked like it had sort of core al-qaeda quality to it. >> and so this gets to ben's point which, i think, is a good one which is this list would kind of have to evolve, because you wouldn't have put shabaab on the list before the kenya mall attack. >> right. and i don't know that i would now.

>> right. but the point is it would be evolving, and you might get off it. hezbollah would have been been on it in 1983 and wouldn't be on it today. >> this brings you back to this second worst of all possible worlds because you don't want everybody to sort of stay on. you don't, frankly, want it to be like fisa where you have the authorities and then you sort of can't go back and revisit do we need them. you don't want authority, this statute to be in ten years just like the statute we have now. so how given the brokenness of our legislative system, i don't have an answer for how we design a war authority that doesn't become static in exactly the way that you -- >> and it raises a bigger issue which is when are we not at war, you know, just writ large? >> well, and this actually, frankly, comes back to the questions that micah raised which is as it has become easier and easier and easier to use lethal force, how do we institute real oversight and protection and democratic decision making about this whole

category of near war? which, frankly, we're going to see a lot more near war than we are going to see actual -- >> well, here's a question for all of you then. i mean, one approach you could imagine that is sort of -- did more than just a u.s. approach is to have some kind of geneva protocol and/or convention about the use of force that would be, well, obviously, drones would be the kind of issue that you'd focus on. but many a sense, it's about -- in a sense, it's about in what circumstances can states use violence outside their own borders in a way that we all agree collectively as -- would that, i mean, you know, the geneva convention's been written on a number of occasions. would that kind of approach work, and is that a discussion worth having? >> it's very much a discussion worth having. there is no substantive agreement even between the u.s. and its allies as to the answer to those questions. and i think the likelihood that

you could get agreement as to, i mean, it comes back to these questions of how imminent does a threat have to be. and, you know, there has been some convergence between the united states and the be european governments on those questions. there has not been a lot. there's not been complete convergence, and i think the idea you could get a written document that even the united states and europe could agree to is improbable. and what you've seen in our international relations with pakistan is that there is zero agreement as to, as to -- although there are accommodations, but there's no conceptual agreement as to what, when you have the authority to use force on the territory of a neutral party. >> yeah. it took ten years, it took ten years for the international community to agree that the use of biological -- i mean, to agree to the 1925 use of

chemical weapons. so the fact there's going to be disagreement about something isn't necessarily a reason to say, hey, we shouldn't be having discussion. >> i didn't say that. >> yeah. >> i think it is to the extent -- and i think, look, the u.s./european convergence has been substantial. >> [inaudible] >> so the convergence is the europeans have come to accept a more -- a less temporal understanding of imminence than they had. thatthat is, they've moved towad our view of what imminence means, at least de facto. and we have moved solidly toward the idea that imminence is important. and so the president's may 23rd speech said for the first time we will only, you know, use drone strikes, use lethal force in circumstances of imminent threat even under the aumf. and that -- now, whether he, you know, what that means is a hard question. but at least on, at least at the

conceptual level there has been a significant movement both on this side of the atlantic and on the other toward a more i wouldn't say, i don't want to overstate it, i don't want to say there's a common understanding, there's a more common understanding. >> let me ask a question for everybody which is you all know that the chinese announced about a year ago that they were planning to use an armed drone to kill a notorious drug trafficker. i think he was in burma, just over the chinese border. in the end, they decided to capture him. by the standards that we employ, clearly this would have been a legal strike from the way that we think about threat. >> oh, i think not. >> because? >> i mean, we -- generally speaking, the authorizing document for those strikes is an authorization for the use of military force which we cop tend is international -- contend is

international law compliant. and as i understand the chinese position toward drug lords, this was a law enforcement operation. we don't really blow people up in law enforcement operations very often. >> really? i mean, doesn't this get right to the heart of this whole issue, which is this guy, i think, had also kidnapped 14 chinese, i think, sailors. more than just a conventional drug trafficker. i mean, isn't in the whole point of the discussion, which is this is an example of somebody who posed some kind of military threat to the chinese, in their view. i mean, he was kidnapping their servicemen. of and he was -- it wasn't feasible to capture him, at least initially. i mean, and this goes to the question of kind of geneva convention or protocall idea -- protocol idea which is surely since the chinese have already demonstrated they can -- hay may well use our rationale, we need

to have some kind of international rationale here that is agreed to. >> look -- >> even as complicated as it is. >> i mean, i don't think -- the analog would be a, you know, a mexican drug cartel type who is not posing an imminent threat to any hostages, but in general causes, you know, poses a significant threat as a general proposition. we, a, don't use drones in those situations. we consider them law enforcement. when you take stuff out of the context of the aumf, you lose a lot of military options. and that's why the question of the scope of the aumf is actually important. >> understood. but, i mean, the drone strikes are not completely dependent on the aumf. they're also dependent on the article ii authorities the president has, right? so when the aumf expires, it's not like drone strikes are going to end. so, micah, do you have any sort of views on -- >> well, i would say i disagree slightly with ben.

spend a lot of time with european leaders, and there might be some convergence over imminence, but there's strong disagreement over hostilities. the issue of signature strikes, in particular, drives e.u. countries up the wall. the only -- >> what are signature strikes? >> signature strikes are, is a targeting criteria that has a long history in the uses of force and, actually, began under president bush, but it's targeting individuals who are not, who don't appear on a kill list, who aren't known by hair names but -- their names but through patterns of observable behavior appear to be affiliated with the group who is, therefore, targeted. and the very first targeted killing the u.s. ever did in yemen, there were six individualings in a car, only one of them news the individual's name. so signature strikes have been with us the whole time. the obama administration does not acknowledge it conducts them, and there's some rumors

that it might have stopped doing them, but they have never publicly acknowledged that they've done them or stopped doing them. and that's really the disagreement. and just to get to the china issue quickly, the individual who the chinese -- not technically a drone strike. they were going to put munitions, explosives on a remotely-piloted aircraft and, essentially, bomb the compound he was on. he was eventually captured in laos, but he'd killed nationals on the river, had killed them, and by the chinese definition was conceived as a continuing national threat to chinese nationals this and out of the waterways that come in and out of mekong, chinament they decided to capture him. >> protocol, international conventions, normings? >> so the way i would start that, i mean, just to make explicit something that was implicit, it would be enormously helpful for the u.s. to acknowledge this was a

legitimate and good subject for international discussion, frankly, because that helps create norms that bind others. and, frankly, if the disagreement with the europeans is still intense in the ways, micah, that you describe, actually having the europeans come out and complain loudly in public actually wouldn't be a bad thing in terms of trying to rein in the kind of use that you're concerned about in the chinese case. so you could imagine starting with a series of parallel declarations, these are our principles for how we use unmanned vehicles, these are ours, these are ours, these are ours, and you sort of let the marketplace judge, if you will. and there's a great history in arms control and other areas whereas you say it takes a decade or more to get to an agreement, but you start with this kind of we're going to let everybody else know. >> and agreements happen when the united states loses its monopoly, right? i mean, then it's in our interests to have an great. i mean, and our monopoly is gone. >> yes. >> on armed drones. >> yes. >> how many countries do you

think have -- micah? >> lye -- micah's the expert. >> the united states, israel and great britain has conducted in afghanistan. there are barriers to developing the capability though. it's not going to be as fast as i think some people imagine, and it's important to understand the sort of architecture and capabilities that allows the u.s. to do strikes at a geographic distance. people don't simply the have the satellite bandwidth. >> which countries do you think will have the capabilities shortly? iran? russia? >> germany has been claiming since 2011, now the new defense minister says i don't know. you look at a lot of the deadlines when people say they're going the to have drones, they don't meet them. and there are a lot of people who make claims about having drones like the iranians, i don't believe half of what they say. >> do you think the pakistanis have a drone? >> not armed capabilities, no. but you will see this capability used in regional disputes,

because the one thing we learned from the u.s. uses of drones in other states is they lower the threshold for when civilians will decide to authorize military force. people do things with drones like iran does in the persian gulf where they both try to, there's electronic warfare against u.s. predators in the persian gulf all the time. there have been a series of iranian attempted shootdowns of predator drones. they don't do this against manned aircraft. drones are seen as an acceptable way to poke at the united states. so drones have the capabilities to destabilize in ways that other weapons platforms don't. >> and one final question before we open it up. cyber warfare, there are a lot of sort of analogs in a sense to the drone question, right, because it's sort of, it's relatively easy to do, it's potentially, you know, it lowers the cost of attacking. to what extempt, i mean, is --

extent, is there a geneva convention on cyber warfare we need to think about as well? >> there's one place that the u.s., what are the rules of the road for acceptable cyber operations. and what is the distinction between, essentially, preparing the battlefield which is going into another country's information systems to attract, to extract information and what is actually kinetic-like effects and destroying their computer systems -- >> well, was stuxnet an act of offensive warfare, or was it sabotage? >> yes. it was an act of offensive warfare against something we would consider was a threat against the u.s.. >> i think it's worth being very skeptical of the idea of an international cyber norms agreement that anybody would follow precisely because unlike air power even in the form of unmanned aerial vehicles, cyber operations are done almost exclusively in secret, they're

almost always deniable, they're almost always denied, and they're very, very difficult to attribute. and that makes compliance very difficult to contemplate. >> which actually makes it more important that you develop norms on the areas you can develop form norms so that you have even some kind of carryover that says there have to be some limits on what you do with cyber or even if we have no prospect of agreeing with what they are. ..

you would still have the central architecture of some sort in place, which is a u.s. domestic statute that authorizes the use of force against certain groups, perhaps including groups like the haqqani network, and that would raise concerns with the states you are conducting operations as existing law with one important caveat. one of the things that the u.s. -- whatever it is we're operating under, has to be with -- to avoid further exacerbating relations with certain countries, is arguably in compliance. and you can imagine a circumstance in which congress would want to be very aggressive and would pass statutes that

would authorize operations that are not in fact international law compliant. you can imagine that being an irritant in relations with the states in which those operations might take place. with that caveat, it's probably not a -- not a particularly significant factor one way or the other. >> you actually raise a really important point. i you turn your question around a little bit. unfortunately your question tells us more about the u.s. than it does about what happens next in pakistan. but one of the reasons that the current dysfunctional situation works well for american policymakers and one of those other reasons we have so little information, is that it is quite embarrassing to governments, pakistan in particular but not only pakistan, with knowledge that these operations are taking place and they're taking place against entities that, as you

say, there are credible allegations they receive considerable support. so you're in essence, and probably not just -- working with one arm of the government against the other. how do you as a policy matter keep that up if you have to make public, you have to say in advance, you have to say why, say who is the target, that becomes unbearably embarrassing for a government, and if your dealing with a weak civilian government it becomes potentially lethally embarrassing; you can stop the argue atlanta. and say that's why it has to remain secret and remain under the authority of the central intelligence agency. or you can say there's a fundamental flaw in a policy that is dependent on the government of the country where the policy is being carried out, not being able to acknowledge

the policy is carried out, and whether or not there are short-term effects, this poly won't have the long-term counterterrorey. effects we want. so that's the delve of -- the level of debate, but because it is so vary very awkward and the short-term concerns are real, not going to happen. >> when combat operations are over in afghanistan, one of the trickiest items are the 40 prisons at guantanamo, what would you do about them? >> there's a straightforward solution, which is to bring them here, charge the ones that can be charged in civilian courts, as we have done with great

success, and then that gets you down to a smaller number than 40, whom you would either have to flat out release -- here i come back to my world war ii example, which is an interesting one. the u.s. managed to release everyone we held within a few years. now, the last german pows that were released, to britain and france, where they were still doing manual labor well into the 1950s. so, there are a variety of clearly legal and more dubious that people at different places along the spectrum might find more or less objectionable, if the administration were given a free hand to dispose of them without the current restrictions, reporting requirements, an overhang from congress. now, likelihood of that

happening, not huge. so, then you're stuck with counter problem of do you keep them in the u.s. in legal limbo, rather than disbursing them, and that's going to be a fascinating little problem that congress has taken upon itself and is going to have to resolve in the next year or so. >> to attack our consulate or so-called consulate in benghazi. >> i would say -- again, i'm not a -- i'm not in any sense a specialist on any of these groups. >> their actions at the moment. >> i would say define your criteria of groups that -- of what the category, what the behavior of groups that you want to authorize force against, and then allow the executive to designate groups that meet those criteria, subject to congressional -- >> i'm asking you a direct question, attacking one of our

diplomatic facilities -- >> look, i think it is always appropriate to use military force to defend your diplomatic facilities, and so i have no problem with the idea that if a group attacks an american consulate and kills the ambassador, you might respond to that, even preemptively responsible to that will military force. doesn't give me a moment's trouble. >> would you be at war with this group or just be responding with military force because you have marines at these facilities? >> so what? i would not have a specific authorization for the use of military force designated at one group in response to this single attack. on the other hand, i would have a statute in place that would allow that group designation to be covered by an existing authorization. >> okay, this gentleman here.

>> i agree with the young gentleman here that the damaging of the iranian centrifuges was an act of war. was that attack justified -- authorized by the aumf? >> i don't think -- >> nobody would contend it was. >> then somebody authorized it and violated the constitution and congress' monopoly on declaring war. shouldn't they be prosecuted? and as fallup -- followup question, the iranians are supposedly -- you suspect them to retaliate, and there was a case of 32,000 computers getting knocked out in saudi arabia subsequently that a lot of people think iran was behind. we get into the situation where we could be at war with iran and the american people don't even know they're at war. >> you raise a lot of different issues there.

let me tick off a couple of responses. no conflict with iran is covered by the existing aumf. the president has authority under the covert actions statute, under which i'm fairly certain any such action would have -- any action we were involved with, would have been taken. it wouldn't have been done pursuant to aumf. would have been done as a covert action. >> it's worth mentioning in addition -- just to get back to the political aspect of this -- that the members of congress who you say would feel their constitutional rights were violated and would approve that action, you see this in the history of the war powers act. the only time an administration is pressed to fulfill to the letter what the war powers act

says is when congress is controlled by the other party. so our political approach to this question here has been almost always first and foremost about political power, and only secondarily about the questions we're discussing up here, and i think it's just important to have that clear in one's mind. >> in back? thank you. and then the other person in back. >> my name is benjamin crout, law and policy scholar. thinking of unintended consequences of rewriting a document like the aumf, do you believe or not believe it would perhaps encourage a culture at peace with a perpetual state of conflict? as we have kind of seen with the current situation. two questions together.

>> this -- if the panel could comment on specific recommendations for co-bell lidgeans, whether it's al-shabaab or -- is it funding they're receiving from core al qaeda or direct contact on a certain amount of time that some future legislation would need in order to make this transparent as to who the actual enemy is and who we can actually attack or respond militarily. >> okay, good question. unintended consequences and what constitutes a cobelligerent. >> with absolute and utter ignorance about the legal definitions of the term, what i would want to see in belligerence you have sign up with the core aims of al qaeda. i'm sure that there would be a good legally valid way to do that. in terms of long-term effect, i completely agree with what the questioner said, and it's very

difficult to quantify that. we referenced briefly at the beginning the aumf is invoked to justify the nsa surveillance, which of course includes things like the -- looking at the correspondens of the leaders of brazil and germany, neither is a co-bell lincoln rent with al qaeda and you have this kind of troop and you have had a creep of authorities like that. again, if it's not only easier to use force for technical reasons but also easier to use force because we're so afraid of terrorism because terrorism produced what we saw on 9/11, unfortunately we have lost a number of u.s. ambassadors and diplomatic personnel over time, and we didn't tend in the past to start wars over it, to get back to the question that whether the group that attacked the benghazi consulate -- in a way, having worked at the state department, i'd be delighted if

we took it more seriously when bad things happen to our diplomats, but it wasn't before 9/11 in the american tradition -- we didn't go to war after the kenyan tanzania attacks. so we have drifted, as i said in my presentation to this mindset where war is the hammer, a state of war is the hammer and whatever the problem is the nail, and terrorism, very, very serious problem but often times war -- this kind of use of force without explanation and without justification and the full participation of societies, not necessarily the best tool for us, and war, such a potent political tool as home, that we can't have the conversation about, what is the smartest way to deal with a group that attacked the ben -- benghazi consulate. what it going on in iraq? we don't know how to have the conversation without using the paradigms of war and our

political leaders find it difficult to have that conversation and not recommend passage that the public recognizes after this decade of everything being framed in terms of war. >> just to follow up on that, it is inconceivable that everybody is referenced to president obama's may 23rd speech in which we said we need to end this endless war, it is inconceivable that a first-time president would make that speech, because the political -- this is something you do in your second term, because the political cost in this country is saying something we all know is true, which this problem has largely been eliminate -- are so great, and consulate attacked by somebody who one day was part of al qaeda in a loose-knit way. the political costs are high when we say we should have a discussion about ameliorating this state of war, is a legitimate point. it's hard to have a real

conversation about this politically. >> it is hard to have a political conversation about this plate clerks but i think for more honorable reasons than that. the reason it's hard to have a political conversation about this is that we actually don't fundamentally agree as a society about what the role of military force and violence is, and what the weight of our response -- what weight we should give to more traditional extra territorial law enforcement tools and what weight we should give to military and covert action tools, and when you try to define the parameters of the military conflict you are, to a great extent, addressing that question, which is what is the -- is this an extra territorial set of law enforcement problems where you hold the article 2 powers of the president in reserve for exigent sicks or is this a fundamental military conflict and you use law enforcement as occasional or

even frequent tool of the military struggle. those are very different models for how you think about it. one way or other it is a hybrid conflict, but you're addressing what the weight and what the dominant component of it is, and we don't agree on that, and that's why the conversation is very hard to have, and i think that's actually an honorable reason to have trouble having the conversation. i just want to say a breath word on the unintended consequences question. one of the difficulties of our current environment is -- and if you think that in the absence of a renewed, revamped, different sort of aumf, we will drift to something that looks a lot like, you feel very differently about that project, then if you i believe as i believe, that in the absence of intervening legislation, what you're going to have is a piece of.

military muscularity that looks like unauthorized, low intensity conflict over very long periods of time. i think that is the likely outcome. we're going to have a kind of very militarily active peace over the next period of time, and that's -- it's going to look a lot like war a lot of the time, and the question is, do you want to think of as something that come defines the parameters of, in which case you're in the messy business of authorizing it and those that will have the unintended or maybe intended consequences of legitimatizing it, or do you want to deny that's what is happening and let a lot of that legitimacy not happen at the cost of relying to a great extent on article 2 inherent authorities. i am in the former camp. i don't think the president should be doing this stuff on his own to the extent we can avoid it, and i'm willing to get

my hand dirty to avoid that, and yes, i acknowledge my hands would be dirty. >> final. >> the word that any president points to to justify using military force don't constrain him or her, and if they even -- if it is written or not rewritten will not make much operational difference. the capables exist in great abundance. these are broadly endorsed and supported by the american people. over 70% of americans in every poll support all sorts of drone strikes no matter how you define the scope of targeting, and appetite of congress changing this is next to nothing. every president wants maximum authority and minimum oversight, as will future ones. if as citizens you care about these issues, there's a range of things you can do to make your voice heard and try to work your policymakers to do it, but on the current track there's a

tendency to perpetual war. >> on that sobering note, i want to thank you for an absolutely brilliant presentation. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> turning now to capitol hill, the house and senate coming in in just a few funds. at 5:00 the house will work on legislation to create a monument to the -- -- in the senate, debate will continue on the measure to extend long-term unemployment benefits. at 5:00, a confirmation of a judge for the d.c. circuit court. we spoke with a capitol hill reporter.

>> want to take a step back and talk more broadly about congress. it's going to be a busy week. pete, is on the phone, a reporter with the hill. about morning, pete. thank you for joining us. talk about the budget first. we've been waiting for the larger omnibus spending bill to be unveiled. has that happened yet? >> not as of last night, and you mind me to check, but not as of yesterday. and that is the big mission of the week for congress, do it in two stages, pass a short-term bill through saturday that will give them time to' goh through -- go through the spending bill for the rest of the year so we figure that's what they're going to do. seems there's a lot of agreement to do it that way. we get the sense in the house it's going to pass easily on

tuesday. the senate will probably quickly follow, and then fund it through saturday and that gives them three or four days to figure out the rest of the spending bill. that's the big mission of the week, and seems like for all the drama we have had, at least so far, they should be able to push that through. you make the good point that we have to see the bill and members will have to see it and have a few days to look at it, and these things come with surprises sometimes and have to look through and it see if there's language in that draws some opposition. otherwise it's expected to finish by friday or saturday. >> take us to the unemployment benefits bill working through the senate. what's the latest on that? >> that sort of blew up last week. we had democrats came up with a new idea for an 11-month extension of emergency unemployment benefits, paid for by extending the famous sequester that we all talked about for another year. and then democrats said it wouldn't look at any republican amendmented and that hit people funny because republicans helped

advance the bill earlier in the week and suddenly democrats were saying we won't consider any ideas of yours to pay for this. reid says we would look at some republican amendments but didn't say which one. today would be an important day to hear people talk on the floor before the what -- how might they proceed, there are certain number and certain kinds of amendments they might look at that might help advance the bill. >> what is the timing on the senate bill? do you see the house taking this up at all? >> it's hard to say. the senate could take a while still. we really need to hear more this morning and early this week to see what their plan is. if they can pass something where they get republican support how it's paid for you might see the house consider it, but the house has made it clear that republicans made it clear they want to focus on job are training programs, things that get people back to work.

so the senate has to go first to generate any interest to look at it. if they can do it in a way in the senate that gets g.o.p. support the house could look at it. this is too many bank shots into the future. we have to see what the senate is capable of doing. >> it's only monday. but we'll find out. they have a one-week recess next week so they're looking to move forward. last week wasn't the busiest week in commitee. what are you watching this week? >> this week there's not a whole bunch going on. the house will have two obamacare hearings, and so the republicans continue to push up that issue. they -- this week they have a vote on an obamacare bill that would require people to -- require weekly reports how the enrollment is going, what kind of glitches on the web site. so republicans are not letting that go. still a big issue for the

g.o.p., and this is something we can expect all year. republicans keep thinking the premiums are higher and people are losing the plans. seems like there's at least one or two a week hearing-wise we have on obamacare. just seems like it's the issue they ride into the election this year. >> one more question. it's actually two weeks down the road. the state of the union is coming. from what you can tell on the hill and the white house what will that speech be like? just as importantly, how will republicans combat the president's message? >> that's a good question. it's a funny time, i think right now the white house is kind of caught between two funny realities. they want to say there's improvement in the job market. always comes down to jobs, it seems. and yet they're at the same time pushing this unemployment benefit, have it extended. most people think it's kind of a mixed up economy and it's going to make it maybe a difficult

speech to tie all these ideas together, to say we're improving but still need help for people. that's been sort of an overall messaging problem the white house has had, and you have a bunch of republicans who they're still feeling their oats with obamacare, and the irs, all these things they don't want to let go. so we're still in a classic battle of a split government. people call it messaging but sounds like fighting back and forth, people saying our vision is better. i think a lot of ways it's similar to what we have seen the last three years and the g.o.p. will come bat by saying we have a better view on how to get the jobs. this whole year is turning into one great wash. it's already election season, and that everything is message. the speech will be message, and the g.o.p. response will be a message, and we'll all be messaged to death until we finally get to vote if we feel like voting. >> pete ises a reporter for the

hill. thank you very much. >> and more news from capitol hill today. democratic congressman george miller of california announced he will not seek re-election. he served in the house for 40 years, considered a close ally of minority leader and former speaker nancy pelosi, and chev issued a statement saying, my sadness at his departure from congress in 2015 is mitigated only by my certainty he'll utilize his exemplary college skills in a new venue. >> later today remarks from house budget committee chair paul ryan on social mobility and how he thinks taxes, welfare, and entitlement programs make it harder for people to move into the middle class. that's at 4:00 eastern. you can watch that live on c-span. >> nancy reagan was the first sitting first lady to address the united nations and the first to address the nation in a joint appearance with the president. >> so to my young friends out there life can be great, but not

when you can't see it open your eyes to life. see it in the vivid colors that god gave us, the precious gift, to enjoy life to the fullest and to make it count. say yes to your life. and when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no. >> first lady nancy reagan, our original series first ladies, influence and image, returns tonight, live at 9:00 eastern on c-span and c-span 3, and c-span radio and c-span.org. >> and the house and senate coming in just a few minutes. 2:00 eastern time. at 5:00, over in the house, they'll begin debate and work on legislation to create a monument to the peace corps and working on the 2014 spending bill. that's on c-span. and here in the senate live on c-span 2, debate continuing on a measure to extend the long-term unemployment benefits.

at 5:30, confirm nation vote on the nomination of robert wilkins to serve as a judge on the d.c. circuit court. the president pro tempore: the senate will come to order. the chaplain, retired admiral barry black, will lead the senate in prayer. the chaplain: let us pray. eternal god, receive our prayers as incense of thanksgiving for your goodness to the children of humanity. lord, an